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U.S. Slams Caracas on Drugs

WORTHY NEWS

By JOSE DE CORDOBA

Venezuelan Guards escorting Drug Traffickers

Venezuela is fast becoming a major hub for cocaine trafficking in the Western Hemisphere, according to a report written by the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. The report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office is sure to raise tensions between Venezuela and the U.S. at a delicate moment in the two countries’ often testy relations.

The report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, blames widespread government corruption for increases in cocaine transshipments through Venezuela. Such shipments have soared more than fourfold to 260 metric tons in 2007 from 60 metric tons in 2004 as the government of President Hugo Chávez has systematically slashed its antinarcotics cooperation efforts with the U.S., according to the report.

“A high level of corruption within the Venezuelan government, military and other law enforcement and security forces contributes to the permissive environment,” says the report, scheduled to be released this month. Many of the drug shipments come from Colombian “illegal armed groups” such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the report says, which the Venezuelan government provides with “a lifeline” of support and a haven within Venezuela. FARC is a communist guerrilla group.

The biggest problem: corruption of Venezuelan officials at all levels, according to the report. Corruption within the Venezuelan National Guard “poses the most significant threat,” the report says, because the “Guard reports directly to President Chávez and controls Venezuela’s airports, borders and ports.” In some cases, the report says, drugs captured by the National Guard and Venezuela’s Investigative Police, who are often themselves involved in drug trafficking, aren’t destroyed, but are taken by the officials or returned to drug traffickers.

“The findings of this report have heightened my concern that Venezuela’s failure to cooperate with the United States on drug interdiction is related to corruption in that country’s government,” said Sen. Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, who commissioned the report.

“The report’s findings require, at a minimum, a comprehensive review of U.S. policy towards Venezuela,” he added.

Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Álvarez, said in a statement that he wouldn’t comment on the report because he hadn’t yet received it. But Mr. Álvarez said Venezuela is engaged in a “complex fight against drug trafficking” which has been recognized by the Organization of American States, Interpol and many other countries.

The GAO report comes at a particularly delicate time in U.S.-Venezuelan relations. Last month, the two countries agreed to re-establish ambassadors for the first time since September, when Venezuela expelled the U.S. ambassador and the U.S. followed suit. Mr. Álvarez said the report wouldn’t help this rapprochement.

The report also comes as Mr. Chávez and the Obama administration have formed an unlikely alliance to restore Honduras’s ousted President Manuel Zelaya, one of Mr. Chávez’s closest regional allies, who was deposed last month. Honduran soldiers, acting on a Supreme Court warrant, detained Mr. Zelaya in a pre-dawn raid for pushing a referendum to rewrite the constitution allowing him to remain in power — a move the court had declared illegal — and put him on a plane out of the country.

But Mr. Chávez, who is funding Mr. Zelaya’s efforts to make a comeback, has excoriated a U.S.-backed mediation effort to restore Mr. Zelaya, and angrily threatened to depose the interim government.

In the past few years, drug trafficking through Honduras has risen sharply, with many shipments of cocaine arriving in flights from Venezuela on their way to Mexico and the U.S., say officials in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.